New Faces and a Contentious Revival

Sunday

Storekeepers and landlords tangle over change in Santa Ana, Calif., where second- and third-generation Latinos are often less interested in buying “goods from back home” that attract newer immigrants.

Correction Appended

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Business has never been slower at Mina Bridal, which sells billowing taffeta ballroom dresses in colors like hot pink and electric blue for quinceañeras, the traditional 15th birthday celebration for Mexican girls.

Mina Madriles, who has run the downtown store for nearly three decades, said that a generation ago girls would have elaborate parties just as their parents had — where a $1,000 dress was just a fraction of the expense. Now, she is giving away her dresses to some families who hire her to coordinate the party at their homes to save money.

“Nobody has any money anymore; there’s nothing we can do,” Ms. Madriles said.

Fourth Street — also known as Calle Cuatro — has long been the center of Latino business in Orange County, the place where Mexican immigrants could find nearly anything they might have looked for in their homelands. Along some stretches, it is impossible to hear anything but Spanish. The signs beckon customers to travel to Guadalajara or buy a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots for a “super discuento,” and the sidewalk vendors shout, “Frutas, frutas,” as they call attention to their freshly cut coconuts and mangos.

But as the economy has soured, many of these stores have struggled to stay afloat. Some stores closed, others asked their landlords for a reduction in rent. At the same time, several property owners began pressing to create a group to improve downtown Santa Ana.

The owners, who were mostly white, were determined to make it more welcoming to English-speaking clients and bring in customers from more affluent parts of Orange County. What they really wanted to do, opponents said, was scrub away any suggestion that it is an immigrant hub, in a city that is 85 percent Latino. Fiesta Marketplace changed its name to “East End,” and the pink buildings that might evoke a Mexican plaza were repainted in muted hues. A few stores put up signs proclaiming, “Stop ethnic cleansing.”

Supporters of the changes say any charge of racism ignores the fact that nearly all of the new businesses that have opened in the last two years are owned and operated by Latinos.

But what is largely left unsaid is that those shop owners and their customers are second- and third-generation Latinos, often far less interested in buying the “goods from back home” that attract more recent arrivals. This generation has more money to spend and is more like the well-heeled shoppers one would find throughout Southern California.

“I don’t want to go someplace else to buy my suits,” said Carlos Bustamante, a city councilman and Santa Ana native, the son of Mexican immigrants. “There should be options for everybody here. The city is not changing ethnically; it’s changing socioeconomically.”

On one corner of Fourth Street, a restaurant that served Mexican seafood for decades is being replaced with a high-end hamburger joint. Farther down, a longtime jeweler closed its doors this year. But a T-shirt and tattoo supply shop a block away says business has never been better, as high school students stop in daily.

“All of them are children of immigrants,” said Danielle Barragan, the owner of the store. “Their parents might not want to spend the money, but they will give it to their children, and they will come spend it here.”

But business has dried up for the dozens of quinceañera shop owners like Ms. Madriles. Her husband, Adolfo Lopez, was one of just two immigrants on the board of the Downtown Property Business Improvement District, the group promoting the area. But he was forced to resign when the couple did not pay the taxes required by the group.

Ms. Madriles echoes much of the anger of the older merchants downtown: “What are we paying for? They don’t do anything for us. They only care about nightlife and bringing in the wealthy, but those people aren’t going to help my business.”

Much of the ire has been directed at Irving and Ryan Chase, a father-and-son team who own a large swath of buildings on the east end of Fourth Street that had long been called Fiesta Marketplace.

For decades, the area housed a carousel and small bandstand, which served as an impromptu gathering spot and occasionally as a more formal event space. When the Chases revamped the area, they removed the carousel and the kiosk, replacing it with a large tree and circle of benches. The project was partly financed by a $765,000 redevelopment grant from the city.

The Yost Theater, a former Spanish movie house that eventually became a home for a Pentecostal church, has now been transformed into a club and concert venue. Boosters hope that it will be one of the major draws for downtown, but detractors see it as a symbol of the immigrant community’s losing what it once had.

“You have this area that was something public and you have an owner who can just take it away without any input from the community that really relies on it,” said Carolina Sarmiento, a board member of El Centro Cultural de Mexico, a community group that was once housed in a downtown building but was recently kicked out, when owners said that the teenagers it attracted were damaging the building. That prompted a new round of criticism that the new projects were designed to get rid of Mexican culture in the area.

“They are only interested in making money for themselves, that’s it,” said Sam Romero, a longtime community activist who has run a Catholic book and gift shop for more than 40 years. Mr. Romero bristles at the suggestion he should modernize his store.

“I have one of the messiest stores in downtown, I don’t care,” he said. “If I go buy expensive new furniture and merchandise, people aren’t going to come here. And then I have a loan I can’t repay and they’ve succeeded in kicking me out.”

Irving Chase said that he had gone to great lengths to help many of the struggling businesses, reducing their rent by as much as 75 percent.

“They’re in business because I’m propping them up,” he said. “But I can’t do that forever. Some of them are going to make it because they are going to change, and others are just going to keep doing things the way they’ve always done, and they will fail.”

His son said he had purposely kept vacancies in his buildings for more than a year, waiting for just the right tenants. When one barber shop owner approached him, he initially said he was not interested, but when he looked at the Web site for the shop, he realized that the “cool retro vibe would be something totally different for the area,” Ryan Chase said. Now, the American Barber Shop has a prime corner of Fourth Street, with its vintage barber chairs clearly visible from the street.

At the west end of Fourth Street sits Calacas, a gift shop that has become one of the most popular new places. The owners, Jackie and Rudy Cordova, sell everything from tiles to papier-mâché skeletons.

For those who worry about gentrification, Rudy Cordova is seen as a born-and-bred native. For those eager to revitalize the district, he is seen as a brilliant entrepreneur. Mr. Cordova, a 38-year-old son of immigrants, thinks of himself as somewhere in between. His children are learning Spanish, he said, but his son is attending far fewer quinceañeras than he did at his age. He knows today’s teenagers are unlikely to shop in the discount stores along Fourth Street that his parents once favored.

“But can you really wipe out the culture of Santa Ana?” he asked. “No matter what changes, this city is going to be Mexican for a long time.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the roadway running along the coast, south of the Orange County border. It is Interstate 5, not Highway 1. (While Highway 1 runs along much of the California coast, it ends at Interstate 5, near Dana Point in southern Orange County.)

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